Tuesday, September 08, 2009
THE KNIVES ARE OUT FOR USELESS PARENTS
The latest news - that Scouts are being advised not to carry (pen)knives any longer - makes for depressing reading and is yet another nail in the coffin of any sort of 'normal' society - ie one where it is possible to carry what may be deemed to be an offensive weapon without the authorities automatically assuming you're likely to attack someone.
As a boy, my brothers and I and our friends loved knives - they were so useful and represented an early opportunity to justify parental trust and enjoy some independence. I think my father took me to a shop in Bulford, near Larkhill where we were then stationed (my father was an Army officer) to buy my first knife. We left Larkhill for Malaya in 1965, when I was about seven, so I must have acquired my first, albeit small penknife around the same age. I had that little knife for many years, well into adulthood, and I think I was able to pass it on to my sons when I, in my turn, thought they were old and sensible enough.
In the shop, the display case of gleaming penknives was irresistible and I would compare the relative merits of each knife, looking for the best combination of blades, construction and materials, design, shape and of course price. I would then covet the chosen one until I had enough pocket money to buy it, or could persuade my parents to give it to me as a Christmas or birthday present. My Godfather, who had been in the Army with my father when younger, used to send me penknives at Christmas from America. That's how totally normal they were back then.
It was always tricky to decide whether to go for a knife with lots of blades, but possibly poorer construction, or a simpler affair with just one - or maybe two - blades, which would usually be better made and last longer. Blades invariably did get damaged or snapped off, in trying to make a knife do something for which it wasn't designed, like being a screwdriver or levering the lid off something. Once a blade was broken, sometimes it could be ground back to become useful again, but usually the knife just languished in a drawer, lamented but no longer loved - not when the breakage offered a cast-iron reason to seek out and buy a new knife!
But other than being told sternly that 'Knives are dangerous and are not toys.' we were neither given nor needed any detailed instructions in how to carry and use them safely. You very quickly learnt that trying to use the knife to open a tin of beans would either break the blade or result in it folding up on your fingers, something you only ever did once. Lockblades were a great discovery, but they tended to be cheaply made at the pocket money level - I did buy one in a huntin'/shootin'/fishin' shop in Dulverton when I was on Exmoor for a Combined Cadet Force camp when I was, oooh, 14 - in 1972. No school master forbade me buy it and none of my fellow-cadets were ever in any danger from it.
And so we whittled away our spare time and an essential part of our boyhoods, making walking sticks and bows and arrows, cutting string and other important accessories of boyish pursuits. As far as I know our parents never worried that we were going to stick our knives either in ourselves, each other or complete strangers.
As we got older, so we graduated from penknives to sheath knives and although they were great things to have, in some ways they weren't as useful or versatile as a good penknife. We could even wear sheath knives on our belts, at least at home.
So, what has changed in the intervening years? Well, like most malaises of society, I fear the change in knife 'culture' if that word is really appropriate, comes down to incompetent parenting, plain and simple. My parents didn't have to beat me to instill discipline and respect for my fellow man (or boy) in me and although they were reasonably strict, you can see that they allowed us a fair bit of latitude as children. We would no more have dreamt of threatening someone with a knife, let alone attacking them with it, than we would have set fire to the local school!
With the media full of stories of feral children and the horrendous crimes perpetrated by children supposedly too young to take responsibility for their actions, it's glaringly obvious that we are looking at a catastrophic social breakdown brought about by generations of badly brought-up children becoming feckless parents themselves.
Being married to a teacher at a successful state school with relatively minor social problems, I get an inkling of some of the things going on and wrong with today's children. Too much bad child behaviour has become normalised and almost acceptable, just to get the job done and it's making it impossible for schools to impose the discipline that allows classes to be managed, at least in the state system. The degeneration of Rock and Polzeath into drunken squalor as armies of private school children descend (often without parents) on Cornwall shows that the deteriorating behaviour of the young is a problem that spans the whole class 'system'.
There was once an entirely reasonable expectation that children would come to school equipped to interact with their peers properly, be able to use cutlery and the lavatory successfully and imbued with basic politeness and respect for authority so that they could sit (reasonably) quietly in class and pay enough attention to make it possible for teachers to educate them. Without these things a school cannot function and ultimately families and society cannot function.
Children have an instinct for what is right and wrong and although the savage lies just below the skin, as exemplified by Lord of the Flies and the death of James Bulger and subsequent child-perpetrated atrocities, it is possible to produce and raise children who can become decent useful citizens. That means them being brought up in a loving, consistent but disciplined way and being made to realise as early as possible that the world does not revolve around them and then understanding that a knife is a tool and not first and foremost a weapon of self-defence or offence.
Knife crime, underage drink and drug abuse and youthful promiscuity are all problems that could be fixed, if we were brave enough to empower governments to do something about them, but the steamroller of rampant liberalism grinds on, leaving an increasingly broken society behind it. It's a grim thought that it has taken just a couple of generations to undo what it took nations many painful centuries to achieve - something approaching real civilisation.
The latest news - that Scouts are being advised not to carry (pen)knives any longer - makes for depressing reading and is yet another nail in the coffin of any sort of 'normal' society - ie one where it is possible to carry what may be deemed to be an offensive weapon without the authorities automatically assuming you're likely to attack someone.
As a boy, my brothers and I and our friends loved knives - they were so useful and represented an early opportunity to justify parental trust and enjoy some independence. I think my father took me to a shop in Bulford, near Larkhill where we were then stationed (my father was an Army officer) to buy my first knife. We left Larkhill for Malaya in 1965, when I was about seven, so I must have acquired my first, albeit small penknife around the same age. I had that little knife for many years, well into adulthood, and I think I was able to pass it on to my sons when I, in my turn, thought they were old and sensible enough.
In the shop, the display case of gleaming penknives was irresistible and I would compare the relative merits of each knife, looking for the best combination of blades, construction and materials, design, shape and of course price. I would then covet the chosen one until I had enough pocket money to buy it, or could persuade my parents to give it to me as a Christmas or birthday present. My Godfather, who had been in the Army with my father when younger, used to send me penknives at Christmas from America. That's how totally normal they were back then.
It was always tricky to decide whether to go for a knife with lots of blades, but possibly poorer construction, or a simpler affair with just one - or maybe two - blades, which would usually be better made and last longer. Blades invariably did get damaged or snapped off, in trying to make a knife do something for which it wasn't designed, like being a screwdriver or levering the lid off something. Once a blade was broken, sometimes it could be ground back to become useful again, but usually the knife just languished in a drawer, lamented but no longer loved - not when the breakage offered a cast-iron reason to seek out and buy a new knife!
But other than being told sternly that 'Knives are dangerous and are not toys.' we were neither given nor needed any detailed instructions in how to carry and use them safely. You very quickly learnt that trying to use the knife to open a tin of beans would either break the blade or result in it folding up on your fingers, something you only ever did once. Lockblades were a great discovery, but they tended to be cheaply made at the pocket money level - I did buy one in a huntin'/shootin'/fishin' shop in Dulverton when I was on Exmoor for a Combined Cadet Force camp when I was, oooh, 14 - in 1972. No school master forbade me buy it and none of my fellow-cadets were ever in any danger from it.
And so we whittled away our spare time and an essential part of our boyhoods, making walking sticks and bows and arrows, cutting string and other important accessories of boyish pursuits. As far as I know our parents never worried that we were going to stick our knives either in ourselves, each other or complete strangers.
As we got older, so we graduated from penknives to sheath knives and although they were great things to have, in some ways they weren't as useful or versatile as a good penknife. We could even wear sheath knives on our belts, at least at home.
So, what has changed in the intervening years? Well, like most malaises of society, I fear the change in knife 'culture' if that word is really appropriate, comes down to incompetent parenting, plain and simple. My parents didn't have to beat me to instill discipline and respect for my fellow man (or boy) in me and although they were reasonably strict, you can see that they allowed us a fair bit of latitude as children. We would no more have dreamt of threatening someone with a knife, let alone attacking them with it, than we would have set fire to the local school!
With the media full of stories of feral children and the horrendous crimes perpetrated by children supposedly too young to take responsibility for their actions, it's glaringly obvious that we are looking at a catastrophic social breakdown brought about by generations of badly brought-up children becoming feckless parents themselves.
Being married to a teacher at a successful state school with relatively minor social problems, I get an inkling of some of the things going on and wrong with today's children. Too much bad child behaviour has become normalised and almost acceptable, just to get the job done and it's making it impossible for schools to impose the discipline that allows classes to be managed, at least in the state system. The degeneration of Rock and Polzeath into drunken squalor as armies of private school children descend (often without parents) on Cornwall shows that the deteriorating behaviour of the young is a problem that spans the whole class 'system'.
There was once an entirely reasonable expectation that children would come to school equipped to interact with their peers properly, be able to use cutlery and the lavatory successfully and imbued with basic politeness and respect for authority so that they could sit (reasonably) quietly in class and pay enough attention to make it possible for teachers to educate them. Without these things a school cannot function and ultimately families and society cannot function.
Children have an instinct for what is right and wrong and although the savage lies just below the skin, as exemplified by Lord of the Flies and the death of James Bulger and subsequent child-perpetrated atrocities, it is possible to produce and raise children who can become decent useful citizens. That means them being brought up in a loving, consistent but disciplined way and being made to realise as early as possible that the world does not revolve around them and then understanding that a knife is a tool and not first and foremost a weapon of self-defence or offence.
Knife crime, underage drink and drug abuse and youthful promiscuity are all problems that could be fixed, if we were brave enough to empower governments to do something about them, but the steamroller of rampant liberalism grinds on, leaving an increasingly broken society behind it. It's a grim thought that it has taken just a couple of generations to undo what it took nations many painful centuries to achieve - something approaching real civilisation.
Labels: feckless parents, feral children, knife culture, knives
